


Shreds

by slavfox



Category: Blaseball (Video Game)
Genre: Cat Cafés, Friendship, Gen, Smoking
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-11
Updated: 2021-02-11
Packaged: 2021-03-17 14:40:07
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,394
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29352096
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/slavfox/pseuds/slavfox
Summary: In which Nagomi Nava makes a friend.
Kudos: 5





	Shreds

The Cat Café was unique among the infrastructure of the Hellmouth. Whether in the early mornings, there to greet the Sun and welcome a new day, or as a sole warm light in the cold desert nights, a safe place to wait out the nightmares and demons roaming the streets - it seemed to hide from those who didn’t need it, and always be open for those who did. Nagomi, its caretaker, quickly grew accustomed to the slight nudge at the edge of her consciousness that the Café announced its desire to open with.  _ “Hey, someone needs you” _ , it seemed to whisper, and she’d always do her part and be there to greet them with a warm cup of coffee.

That, of course, didn’t mean she couldn’t take a quick smoke break from time to time. 

For the rest of the Hellmouth, the Café itself was their quiet safe place. Nagomi had her own, on the steps through the back door. A couple cubic feet of space that was just hers alone, for the times when  _ she herself _ needed the Café. She watched her cigarette shrink gradually as she processed the events of yesterday; never before had the Café been as… cat-less as it was that day. 

There were times when the world itself felt cold and unwelcoming. Yesterday was one of those times. It wasn’t even the loss itself that really got her - it was how the loss impacted all of her friends, how an unseen wave of grief washed over the entire league. Her job did not make processing it any easier. 

But the Randall Marijuana Memorial Cat Café promised to be open and welcoming to all, promised to provide warmth and comfort to those who needed it - and Nagomi had to uphold that promise. The cats had returned now, and she needed those few moments for herself, to bury the sorrow and find the light inside again. She’d left the front doors of the Café unlocked, as usual - the Hellmouth wouldn’t let any troublemakers get here, anyway.

“Friend? You’re awfully quiet today.”

The shadow on her face twitched, but didn’t respond. It’s not easy to empathize with an extradimensional eldritch horror, but they’ve been together long enough for Nagomi to be able to tell when something was wrong. Friend seemed tense. 

“Usually, I wouldn’t hear the end of it from you for  _ ‘destroying my health like this’  _ or whatever.” She waved the smouldering cigarette around to punctuate her point, “What’s wrong?”

No reply. She sighed, stubbed out the cigarette on the nearby ashtray, and rose to reach for the café’s back door.

“You’re tense, so something’s troubling you. It started just now, so it’s your precognition. I’m not in danger, or you would’ve warned me. Which means it’s probably the Café, and…”

Nagomi pressed on the door handle and let the door swing open. A cat-shaped wisp of smoke darted past her legs and disappeared behind the counter. “...There’s someone you’d rather not face, huh?”, she finished, smiling at the new customer sitting alone at one of the tables. “Tea, coffee?”

The girl at the table stopped studying its surface, looked up at Nagomi, and froze in uncertainty.

“Tea it is!”, stated Nagomi merrily, without waiting for a response, and turned back to pour water into a kettle - and hide the anxiously twitching shadows on her face.

_ “Calm down”,  _ she breathed quietly, “ _ Why is she making you so nervous? Do you know her?” _ .

“ **NO.** ”, a response appeared in her mind. She stopped for a second. A single tendril of shadow rose out of her left cheek and pointed at one of the jars of tea on the shelf. “ **PICK THAT ONE. NO, I DO NOT KNOW HER.** ”

_ “Thanks.”,  _ she whispered and carefully placed some of the leaves in the teapot, “ _ At least we’re getting somewhere. Does she... know you? You know, maybe from before?” _

“ **NAGOMI.** ”, the shadows groaned, “ **DO YOU REMEMBER WHAT I WAS LIKE,** **_BEFORE?_ ** **THERE IS NO ONE LEFT FROM** **_BEFORE_ ** **.** ”

She chuckled to herself, unfazed, and focused on a thought.  _ “It’s hard to forget. You almost tore me to shreds when you crawled out of the Hellmouth and found me alone outside in the middle of the night.” _

“ **I WAS NOT... IN CONTROL.** ”

_ “I know. It’s okay, I’m with you now.” _ She furrowed her singular brow for a moment and stopped to scratch behind Frank’s ear. Frank was the Café’s resident cat-shaped demon. Although he made sure to correct anyone who dared assume he was an ordinary cat, he appreciated ear scratches the same as most of the Café’s other residents. “ _ Why are you asking about that now?” _

“ **SHE IS WHAT I WAS.** ”

_ “I’m pretty sure she isn’t.”  _ Nagomi grabbed a couple saucers and the teapot and walked out from behind the counter towards the occupied table. “Hey,” she started aloud, setting down a mug in front of the customer, “Are you perhaps an eldritch horror from beyond the bounds of the perceivable cosmos?”

The dark skinned girl raised an eyebrow in confusion. Nagomi waved a saucer at her, imitating buzzing noises, before setting it down on the table. “Bwoom, bwoom, beep beep. Horror detector reads a zero on the horror scale. Forget I asked.”

A cat-shaped clump of hundreds of tiny mice, all very much alive and hanging on to each other for dear life, jumped onto the table - which, Nagomi was sure, was no small feat to coordinate - and gently bumped its “head” against the visitor’s arm with a choir of soft squeaks. She recoiled in surprise.

“Don’t be scared! That’s Mouse, one of the cats. Apparently he’s named after a dog from a book. Beats me why you’d name a cat after a dog. ” Nagomi explained, reaching to pet Mouse. The “cat” waved his tail in frustration - which shook loose and sent flying a formation of mice - and turned to glare at her.

“Is all of the Hellmouth this...”, the customer started, uncertainly, looking directly at Friend. The shadow shifted beneath her stare, trying to hide itself in Nagomi’s hair. Mouse scoffed, jumped down on the floor with a loud squeak, and trotted off towards You, another one of the cats.

“Weird? The universe is weird.”, Nagomi shrugged. “The Hellmouth helps us come to terms with the weirdness  _ inside us _ \- and inside others. It takes in everyone, and doesn’t judge. At worst, it might eat you.” 

She chuckled, poured a full mug of tea, and slid it in front of her guest. “Black with orange peel, your favorite. Don’t ask me how I know.” Her guest grabbed the mug and nodded.

“All of us have our quirks, demons, face-tentacles, you name it” - Nagomi continued - “and we all try to figure out which of those are  _ us _ , and which should be left behind. The Hellmouth brings them out to the surface, so that we all may face this ‘weirdness’ on our own terms. Despite all the, you know, freaky demonic crap - the nightmares, the Adaptations - it’s a place of acceptance. It isn’t any more hostile than the rest of the world; it’s just that  _ everything  _ is... much more tangible here.”

The visitor hesitated for a moment, fiddling with her nose piercing.

“And did you find that acceptance here? Face your...  _ weirdness _ ?”

Nagomi smiled. “‘And can I’, right? I was very lost when I first came here. So was Friend.” She gestured to the shadows on her face, which shifted and peeked out from behind her bangs with seven otherworldly eyes in response. “Two souls without a home who found it in each other, yadda yadda. If you’ve seen any feelgood holiday movie, you’ve heard the story; just, you know, swap the nerdy kid for an eldritch monster.”

She stood up and walked over to the counter, grabbing a remote. 

_ “ _ **_YOU RECOGNIZE HER._ ** _ ” _ , whispered the shadows. “ _ Of course I do”,  _ she thought in response, “ _ it’s the piercing.” _

The Café’s TV was currently showing a very distraught splorts reporter talking about yesterday’s events, now dubbed Ruby Tuesday by the press. The Café was supposed to be a warm, welcoming place - somewhere you’d run away to from tragedy, not be exposed to it. She turned the TV off.

“I can’t presume to know exactly what you’re looking for this far from home-”, she started warmly, 

“-But we’ll do all we can to help you find it. Welcome back, Jaylen Hotdogfingers.”


End file.
